


You Are Responsible: Trash, Art, and Monsters in "Home Again"

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [39]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, season 10 e4 home again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-23 09:16:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6111928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I’m sure it’s partly my own frustration with Chris Carter that is driving this reading; but honestly, to me, so far, this whole Season 10 seems like a kind of group intervention in which some of the best writers who ever worked on this show sit Chris Carter down and tell him, “Look, Chris. You’ve hit bottom. Things are gonna have to change.” Because if this is an episode about treating people like trash, about taking responsibility for what you’ve made, about the futility of hiding problems and thinking that as long as they’re out of sight that makes it OK…by those standards, is this episode not actually calling out Chris Carter’s handling of the William storyline as a crime in and of itself?</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are Responsible: Trash, Art, and Monsters in "Home Again"

I am glad I went to the trouble to find an Internet connection strong enough to deliver this time. Because this is an episode where you don’t want to miss the visual details–or the facial expressions–because of hiccups in the stream. I liked “Founder’s Mutation.” I have great affection for “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster.” But if I were going to choose one of these revival episodes that most answers the question, “Why were you so into the X-Files, back in the day?” it would be this one. “Home Again” combines strong character work, social commentary, metanarrative, and a legitimately terrifying monster into a 21st century parable about creation and responsibility which occasionally points out its own moral a little too explicitly, and yet at the same time is so layered and, in some ways, ambiguous that it will repay rewatching. And it can be read, though of course one doesn’t have to, as a continuation of the metacommentary about the show and its creator begun in “Founder’s Mutation” and carried through in “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster.” I’m sure it’s partly my own frustratios with Chris Carter that is driving this reading; but honestly, to me, so far, this whole Season 10 seems like a kind of group intervention in which some of the best writers who ever worked on this show sit Chris Carter down and tell him, “Look, Chris. You’ve hit bottom. Things are gonna have to change.” Because if this is an episode about treating people like trash, about taking responsibility for what you’ve made, about the futility of hiding problems and thinking that as long as they’re out of sight that makes it OK…by those standards, is this episode not actually calling out Chris Carter’s handling of the William storyline as a crime in and of itself?

“Home Again” was intended to be the follow-up episode to “My Struggle.” I can see the rationale for moving it: Mulder and Scully’s conversation on the sidewalk (”Do you ever think about William?”) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as something that happens AFTER the Conversation On The Log, plus the lighthearted and flirty “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” doesn’t make emotional sense for Scully as something that happens right after Maggie’s death. Also, for whatever reason, Mulder and Scully seem more ‘estranged’ in “Founder’s Mutation” than they do in “Home Again,” where the more intense emotions produce, as they should, a more intense connection between Mulder and Scully. But it would have worked much better as their first case back on the job–I just love the flashlights and stairs conversation–and as the newbie viewers’ introduction to William. 

Because I do like the way “Home Again” works William into the storyline, first as a few blips in Scully’s subjectivity and then finally as full flashbacks. Every time Scully gets a call, the first name she sees on her phone is William’s. We think at first that she’s just misreading Bill’s ID, which makes some sense; but then when it happens with Mulder at the hospital, it becomes clear that this is Morgan’s representation of Scully’s emotional state for the past 15 years: she is always waiting and hoping for contact from William, even though she knows that realistically she can’t expect it. That hope flashes across the screen for a split second every time she gets an unexpected call…and then reality overwrites hope, and she sees who it really is. 

Like Wong’s “Founder’s Mutation,” Morgan’s “Home Again” works William’s creation and adoption into the case plot, partly by using Maggie’s heart attack and death to bring up William in the most emotionally gutwrenching way imaginable (for us and for Scully), and partly by creating the thematic connections between capitalist production, human reproduction, and artistic creation which are spelled out for us during Mulder and Scully’s conversation with Trashman. Though I dislike the obviousness with which it is all laid out in that scene, I do love the way the episode brings these things together, in ways which one could spend a lifetime unpacking. I don’t have a lifetime, so let me just hit the highlights.

The idea that an object created by humans in the likeness living creature could be alive, or be a vessel for divine or demonic or some other kind of energy or power, is a feature of some world religions and a source of considerable anxiety in others. The X-Files, back in the day, used this idea as the basis for quite a number of MOTWs; and often these stories were imbued with a kind of fascination/horror with ‘primitive,’ i.e., non-European cultures. In fact, in many vintage X-Files episodes, the supernatural force at work is eventually traced back to a ‘primitive’ and/or exotic religion or folk tradition. In “Our Town,” for instance–a classic early MOTW in which a small town is practicing cannibalism in order to stay young–the ringleader is discovered to have a whole cabinet full of artifacts from his journeys in Africa; in “Teliko” the killer is a creature from African folklore; I’m not even going to tell you about what happens in “Badlaa,” which is probably the absolute worst use ever made of this premise in the first nine seasons. This kind of exploitation of the Exotic Other as a source of horror and mystery is the kind of thing that one found vaguely troubling in the 1990s, but upon rewatch in the 21st century seems pretty indefensible. If you think about how this works in “Our Town,” for instance, this recourse to the primitive takes a plot which is initially about the physical and ethical dangers of our brutalization of animals by the factory-farmed, mass-slaughtered, uber-processed food system capitalism has developed–represented by Chaco Chicken and its sinister founder–and then deflects all the blame by showing us that this whole cannibalism thing REALLY came to Chaco from Africa. Come on, America, one thinks, on rewatch. Own your own fucking evil. YOU are responsible.

There is no better example of how cheesy this “blame it on the primitive” thing became on the X-Files than the season six episode “Arcadia.” Now, I love “Arcadia” as an episode for many reasons, most of them having to do with the way it skewers the cultural attitudes that create and maintain the phenomenon of the “gated community.” [I spend a lot of time explaining that over here.](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fworks%2F3071399&t=OTkwNTM4YzgzYTk3NGIyODJhOWIxOThkNGNmZGJmZDc3YTEyNjFkMCxwcFRUQ3Fhbw%3D%3D)  But “Arcadia” also features one of the lamest ever ‘explanations’ of the monster, which is supposed to have been created by the founder of Arcadia Falls, Mr. Gogolak, who has traveled in Asia and there apparently learned out to create a “Tibetan thought-form.” Gogolak is supposed to have used this ability to create a monster, made out of trash from the landfill the development is sitting on, which punishes Arcadia Falls residents for violating the community regulations that keep Arcadia Falls “aesthetically pleasing,” by which they clearly mean “attractive to bourgeois white people.” That explanation is pure garbage. It would have been better, in every way, to either have let the genesis of the trash monster remain a mystery, or to have explained it as what the episode clearly suggests it really is: the unintended product of the many acts of fear, greed, selfishness, and irresponsibility committed by the residents of this all-American privileged enclave in order to protect themselves from the mess that economic inequality has made of the rest of the country.

Well, “Home Again” is here to take out the trash. “Home Again” specifically and explicitly references “Arcadia” in Mulder’s conversation with Trashman: Trashman claims that HIS garbage killer is a Tibetan thought form and Mulder, in a beautiful little mini-critique of Western misunderstandings of Eastern religion, completely shoots him down. Scully then buries that bullshit once and for all in her “you are responsible” speech: YOU made this thing out of your own hatred and then YOU came down here into the bowels of the earth to try to hide it, so don’t try to blame it on some mystical force beyond your control. In other words, we are jettisoning the cop-out “mysterious East” explanation in favor of one from the Western tradition: the artist who’s so in love with his own creation that he endows it with life, a myth that goes all the way back to the Greeks and Pygmalion.

One of the things I really appreciate about “Home Again” is how well it sustains this examination of art and responsibility. The whole question of whether it’s ethical for the art world to profit from “outsider art” is an interesting one and more complex than Morgan makes it look here; but basically it does eventually boil down to the question of who’s doing the art versus who’s making the money, and what kind of effect ‘street art’ actually has on the community where it’s made. A lot of negative commentary has been directed at the recently-unmasked street artist Bansky, for instance, whose pieces are now quite valuable to collectors, as a self-serving asshole who’s getting rich off ideas he’s stolen from people with REAL street cred. Trashman is posed early in the episode as the answer to the question Mulder asks about who’s actually speaking for the homeless; but Scully’s takedown of him suggests that in the end, this is all about Trashman’s own ego, and that the monster doesn’t really serve the community at all–which is true, because believe me that relocation project is going to go forward regardless, because there are not enough trash monsters in the entire fucking world to kill all the politicians who want to sweep the homeless and everything their precarious existence represents about what’s wrong with our society under the rug. From that point of view my favorite moment is the scene in the stolen-art warehouse, which ends with a shot of blood splattered in streaks and droplets all over a blank canvas with Trashman’s signature–just like a Jackson Pollock painting.

But of course we’re working in the land of fantasy and horror here, so it is but a hop skip and a jump from artistic creations to pseudo-human Creatures. Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_ is, among other things, a critique of a masculinist literary culture which claimed for itself a power as miraculous and life-giving as the mother’s power to give birth. Victor Frankenstein initially dreams of creating a whole race of creatures who would owe him their sole allegiance and gratitude–a project which would cut women out of the reproductive process and allow men to go on reproducing each other ad infinitum. The fact that Victor’s absolute failure refusal to parent his Creature is largely responsible for the creature’s vengeful murderous rampage (and the death of Victor’s beloved Elizabeth) is a quite pointed rebuttal to the kind of rhetoric that you can still hear male artists and writers spouting about their own creative endeavor, in which the work of art is a child to which the unassisted male artist gives birth.  Because the monster not only dismembers his victims, but throws their limbs into a giant garbage truck into which he then climbs as if he is going back to the womb that bore him, “Home Again” also invokes not only _Frankenstein_ itself but the Frankenstein-inspired “Leonard Betts,” the episode in which Scully’s cancer was first revealed. Betts is a mutant human (with a loving and beloved mother) with miraculous power of regeneration which derive from the fact that he literally consumes human cancers, which he gets by combing through surgical waste. We see “Leonard Betts” referenced more subtly in the hospital scenes, as Scully watches in silent horror and despair as the patient that’s just died in the next cubicle is hauled out for disposal like so much trash. That reference suggests we could view the monster as self-perpetuating and self-sustaining, being reborn somehow from the torn flesh of its victims. Which suggests that Trashman’s attempt to neutralize the power of his own anger and hatred  by slapping that unconvincing smiley face on his sculpture may not actually have destroyed the monster at all. Because, as Mary Shelley tells us, where the male artists often get it wrong is thinking that just because you CREATED the thing, you can then control it. Anyone who’s ever raised a baby, for any period of time, knows different.

Anyway. Now, at first, I must say, I really hated the way “Home Again” then brought this around to Scully’s decision to give up William, and especially the last line in which she accuses herself of having treated William like trash. Do we not have enough maternal guilt in this show already? I said to myself. Does Scully really NEED to be forced–as she apparently is, by the flashbacks she has during her confrontation with Trashman–to accept that she was responsible for William because she made him? Doesn’t she already feel that? Isn’t that painful enough for her? Can you just LEAVE HER THE FUCK ALONE? 

But this is why it is such a gift to be a reasoning creature. Because I stop hating that ending, and begin to celebrate it as GENIUS, if I read it as a commentary, not on Scully’s treatment of William, but of Chris Carter’s treatment of him. 

Because who really made the decision to create William and then get rid of him? Chris Carter, that’s who. Chris Carter, who spent SO. MANY. YEARS obsessed with Scully’s fertility, who built all of season 8 around Scully’s pregnancy, who moved heaven and earth and who knows how many other planets to give Scully her miracle baby–and then had her give it up for reasons that did not make sense then and don’t make any more sense now. It sets my teeth on edge every time Mulder or Scully says that “we” made the decision to give William up, because that is absolutely not how it happened. In “William,” Scully puts William up for adoption because she’s afraid that as long as she’s his mother he will be persecuted by the conspiracy. She makes this decision without consulting Mulder at all, who doesn’t find out about it until after he’s captured in “The Truth.” I refuse to believe that Scully would ever have done this. I see it as a direct and brutal authorial intervention by a showrunner who really wanted to do a **pregnancy** plot but had absolutely no interest at all in a **parenting** plot. 

 But maybe the “we” is an indication that Morgan sees it the same way. “William,” the episode in which William is given up, was written and directed by David Duchovny; so in a meta-sense, Mulder was actually involved in the adoption, though of course it was not actually his idea. (Lore has it that both Duchovny and Anderson argued with Carter about giving William up, on the grounds that it was unrealistic, but were overruled.) But more to the point, the “we” may, in a meta sense, include Chris Carter and the writers who were involved in that story. They were the ones who either didn’t understand or refused to confront the massive emotional consequences that William’s loss should logically have had for both Mulder and Scully. Carter did was Trashman did and what the politicians of Philadelphia are doing to the people they treat like trash: swept William under the rug and figured that once he was out of sight the problem was solved. 

Not so fast, Trashman.

The whole emotional plot of “Home Again”–Maggie’s illness and death, Scully’s grief and rage and sorrow, the return of the mysterious Other Scully Brother–hammers home the unbreakable, irreplaceable, uniquely intense bond between mothers and their children. Maggie was the one who always picked up the slack whenever Scully had to go chase monsters or conspiracy men and couldn’t bring William along. She was, functionally, that child’s second parent; and when she looks at Mulder and says “my son is also named William”–I mean, holy shit. On one level, it’s a joke about the many many Williams in The X-Files–Maggie’s husband is also named William and so is Mulder’s father–but mainly, man, I mean look how glad she is to see Mulder at her bedside, not for her sake but because she knows he must be there for Scully. She uses the last few seconds she has to tell him: I loved your child like I loved my own. I’m sorry, I’m going to not finish this paragraph because if I do I will cry.

So basically, between the two of them, old writing partners Morgan and Wong have actually done what Carter never wanted to do: they’ve made William real by showing us the emotional dimensions of the hole he has left in everyone’s lives. They’re forcing the show, whether Carter wants it or not, to take responsibility for what that crap-heap of a plot line really did to Scully, to Mulder, and to poor Maggie, who must have grieved over William too for these past fifteen years. If poor Maggie Scully had to be sacrificed–and Morgan killed off Scully’s dad in season one, too, so I guess it was going to happen–this is a worthy end for a character who probably did more than anyone else on this show to keep Scully real. Goodbye, Maggie. Goodbye Sheila Larkin, whose fine work in “One Breath” and “Wetwired” and so many other episodes convinced us all that Scully was a real person from a real family. Ahab we never got to meet; Bill was and apparently remains an asshat; I can’t even remember at what point Charlie was introduced; but Maggie always Scully’s touchstone, even when Mulder couldn’t be there. We’re all going to lose our mothers someday. It hurts to see Scully lose the last decent family member she had; but at least Morgan knows how to make it hurt as much as it should.


End file.
